Mauser Packaging Solutions Reduces Fleet Maintenance & Labor Costs with eMaint

While most customers use eMaint to manage stationary assets that never change locations, that wasn’t the case for Mauser. The assets the company wanted to monitor are mobile semi-trailers that are on the road transporting packaging anywhere across the United States.

Mauser needed to integrate each trailer’s location with its maintenance history. Besides knowing where every trailer was located, it was important for anyone working on the trailer to easily access its maintenance history in order to determine when to perform preventive maintenance tasks.

“We had a gap between the paper management and maintenance,” explained Alexandria Burek, a program analyst at Mauser. “We had ERP (enterprise resource planning) software that did keep track of certain aspects of trailer maintenance, but it was very basic and didn’t get as granular as we wanted.”

Besides the ERP software, Mauser uses an integrated GPS device and software solution called SkyBitz to track the location of each trailer. However, when GPS devices would fail, Mauser had very limited visibility about where the trailer was. “It was a lot of wasted effort,” said Burek. “There were people literally having to walk through a trailer yard with hundreds of trailers, inspecting them … we didn’t have the people or resources to dedicate to just finding trailers that needed maintenance or needed a new GPS tracking device.”

As Mauser continued to grow, the cost of the ERP component began increasing drastically. This led Mauser to look for a single answer to all the challenges it faced across its business. It found the solution with eMaint.

The information Mauser wanted to gather and manage with eMaint’s software was unique compared to other companies that typically use it. But with Mauser’s vision and eMaint’s flexibility, the integration project was successful.

eMaint’s customizability allowed its maintenance solutions to integrate seamlessly with SkyBitz’s wireless GPS tracking, providing visibility into trailer locations as well as insight into each trailer’s maintenance history and preventive and predictive maintenance needs.

“It’s incredible to think of something and then literally bring it to life,” said Burek. “Of course, that wouldn’t have been possible without the experts on the eMaint side who took my idea and created all of the actual technology behind it. That was awesome to see, and it’s been easier, faster, and less expensive than most people would think.”

Mauser has been using eMaint for less than a year, but the results already speak for themselves. Mauser was able to quickly improve the level of data it was collecting, and improve its maintenance processes as a result.

“As our trailers come into different area fleet manager’s locations, essentially they can see the history of the asset,” said Burek. “By using the integration with eMaint and the GPS technology we can also tell the area fleet managers when the trailers need to be maintained.” This data allows technicians to see when and where it was previously repaired and allows Mauser to shift to proactive and preventive maintenance methods, resulting in reduced maintenance costs.

The eMaint integration with SkyBitz has even more benefits. It notifies Mauser when the SkyBitz device needs to be replaced, so fleet managers can perform the replacement while the trailer is at their facility. Thanks to the combination of GPS data, maintenance history, and preventive maintenance schedules managed by eMaint, fleet managers know what maintenance needs to be performed for every trailer that arrives at their site.

The standardized workflow has saved Mauser’s team time in processing work orders and saved the manual effort of physically examining every trailer. “We process 500 work orders among six people in a month, and to even save two to five minutes on each work order is a great improvement and hopefully gets our team home with their families more,” said Burek.

“That’s what makes eMaint so great,” she added. “They integrated what would have been previously siloed technology solutions. We’ve transitioned from asset management to proactive maintenance.”